]]>Many religious leaders and organizations have condemned the attacks in Paris and elsewhere while calling for peace, healing, and an end to extremism. With the possibility of backlash against Muslims and debate in the US over admitting Syrian and Iraqi refugees, interfaith groups are expressing solidarity with Muslims and urging that not all Muslims be held responsible for the actions of a few. Watch our conversation with Manal Omar, associate vice president of the Center for Middle East and Africa at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance, about how religious groups are responding to the threat of ISIS.

]]>Radical Islamic groups are using high-quality videos to recruit young Muslims in the US and Europe to join their fight. Now, a Somali Muslim immigrant in Minnesota is fighting back with his own videos—an animated series called “Average Mohamed” that counters extremist ideas about Islam.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2015/03/20/march-20-2015-average-mohamed/25531/feed/0 Combating Muslim Extremism in Britainhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/07/19/july-19-2013-britains-muslim-extremists/19333/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/07/19/july-19-2013-britains-muslim-extremists/19333/#disqus_threadFri, 19 Jul 2013 14:26:52 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=19333Prevent to engage with the Islamic community and to intervene before a person became radicalized. But many British Muslims feel that the policy amounts to religious profiling, and others have criticized Prevent for being misguided and ineffective. More →

]]>In the wake of terrorist bombings by British-born Islamic extremists in 2005, the British government set up an initiative called Prevent to engage with the Muslim community and to intervene before a person became radicalized. But many British Muslims feel that the policy amounts to religious profiling, and others have criticized Prevent for being misguided and ineffective.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Amid the continuing investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing, President Obama this week spoke of the threat of self-radicalized individuals here in the US and the difficulty of identifying them. He said his counterterrorism team has discussed ways it can engage communities where such radicalization can occur. In recent years, American Muslim groups have launched their own efforts to combat extremism.

For more on this, I’m joined by our managing editor, Kim Lawton, and Haris Tarin. He directs the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Haris, welcome. The president referred to self-radicalizing. What—how does that work, and what can the Muslim community do to prevent it?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, the phenomenon of self-radicalization is where individuals who do not find a place in mainstream Muslim institutions, places like mosques and organizations, they don’t find a place for their fiery rhetoric, for their violent, extremist rhetoric, so they go online, and they listen to sermons, and they listen to individuals like Anwar al-Awlaki or Adam Gadahn or other folks who misinterpret the religion to give it a violent, violent ideology, and they fall prey to these individuals who are basically online predators, and they get influenced by these individuals to address their grievances through violence.

ABERNETHY: And then what can you do about it?

TARIN: I think what we can do, number one, is to ensure that there’s a counter-narrative, that there’s a narrative of life, of positivity, that even if you have a grievance or you have a disagreement on policy, whether domestic or international, you can address those policy grievances through civic and political engagement and change that— maybe not overnight, but eventually you have the power to change policy.

KIM LAWTON: I know the Muslim community has been trying to offer these kinds of counter-narratives. Has that just not worked, or what do you need to do differently in order to combat this online issue?

TARIN: Well, I think, you know, I said before, I think to overwhelming extent the American Muslim community has not fallen prey to this. It’s individuals who are radicalized online, but I think what needs to happen is that we need to ensure that we have a narrative that goes viral. A lot of these videos, they are very emotive. These sermons they use violence and gruesome images to tug at the emotion of young people. And so we also need to ensure that when we put out the counter-narrative it’s as savvy, it goes as viral and addresses the same issues and that we’re not afraid to address some of the same policy grievances that they address, but to make sure that the outcome is positive and not negative.

LAWTON: And how do you deal with the perception that many outsiders have that the more religious someone, a Muslim, gets, the more prone he or she is to being violent or being an extremist?

TARIN: Well, I think that notion, fortunately, is false. There’s a notion that the more religious you get it leads to acts of violence. The studies have shown that when people go through rigorous religious training and understanding, they’re less prone to violence, but that people who skip that religious understanding part and have an awakening and then go straight to politics, that’s where they become more prone to violence and twisted ideologies and perverted interpretations of the religion.

ABERNETHY: Is there a special role here for young people? I mean, the perpetrators are young. Does that invite, then, or say that the people who can best correct that are young people?

TARIN: The first thing you have to understand is a lot of young American Muslims, they deal with everything else that all young Americans are dealing with—college tuition, jobs, but there is a place for them to ensure that their peers on college campuses and youth groups are having a conversation that’s positive, that when they see a negative conversation that they step in, and they interfere and ensure that they move the conversation towards a more positive aspect.

ABERNETHY: O.K. Haris Tarin of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Kim Lawton, many thanks to you both.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: In Pakistan, the U.S. government’s use of armed drones to target militants continues to strain relations between the countries. In the past, the administration has avoided talking about its drone program, but on Monday (April 30), a top White House official strongly defended use of the controversial technology. At the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, called weaponized drones both legal and ethical and said their use is consistent with the country’s right to defend itself:

John Brennan: “There is nothing in international law that bans the use of remotely piloted aircraft for this purpose or that prohibits us from using lethal force against our enemies outside of an active battlefield.”

ABERNETHY: For more on this, Kim Lawton is here. She is managing editor of this program. We are joined by Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School and author of The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama. He joins us from New Haven. Professor Carter, welcome to you.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN CARTER (Yale Law School): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: John Brennan said that the use of drones is legal, perfectly legal. You agree with that?

CARTER: I think the administration is right. We’re a nation at war, and in time of war a belligerent certainly has the right to target the leaders of the other side who are in the chain of command, and that’s what we are doing.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: But if the battlefield in essence here has become the entire globe, how does that change the moral calculus of when and how the U.S. uses force justly?

CARTER: Well, I think you’re right that the more important questions are the ethical ones, and one of the ethical questions is how big the battlefield is, because the administration claims the right to target leaders wherever they may show up in the world. A second moral problem that arises is the problem of civilian casualties. Even if we have the right to go after leaders of Al Qaeda, we have to do it, both as a matter of law and as a matter of ethics, in a way that minimizes civilian casualties. The administration doesn’t actually count civilian casualties, so we don’t know how many there have really been. Mr. Brennan says that there have been times that they haven’t actually taken the shot because civilians have been in the line of fire, and if so, I’m glad to hear that, but I still think that we’d be better off if we could have a conversation in which we could talk more about the civilians who are killed. And there’s another ethical problem that we don’t spend enough time thinking about, and that’s the way that the drone war goes away from the front pages. It’s not on the evening news. In Iraq, we’re on the evening news. In Afghanistan, it’s on the evening news. With the drone war, it’s done in secret, it’s clandestine, it’s hard to keep track, and we really should know what’s being done in our name.

LAWTON: What kind of moral oversight would you like to see taking place surrounding this?

CARTER: At minimum, we members of the public ought to demand as much disclosure as possible from both our government, and also that the media cover the drone wars as closely as we cover other wars. There’s no greater and more difficult moral decision a nation makes than killing other people, and it’s quite important, if we are going to do that, that it remain in the forefront of our consciousness, that we not be distracted by other issues.

ABERNETHY: How do we know how many civilian casualties there are? Isn’t that a big danger, that this—that the use of drones will spill over and there will be a lot of civilian casualties?

CARTER: Because the administration doesn’t tell us when there are civilian casualties, or how many, it’s very difficult to keep track. We tend to rely on sources on the ground, some of whom have their own agendas and want to exaggerate it for one reason or another. But if we don’t know how many civilians are dying, we really can’t give a good assessment of the ethical principles that are underlying these attacks.

ABERNETHY: Professor, just very quickly, why now? Why did the administration come out with this now?

CARTER: There have been a lot of voices, including my own, that have been urging an open discussion of this. Because the administration has not acknowledged in the past that this drone program even exists, it’s hard to have public conversation about it. Now we can have an ethical conversation about it, and it’s high time that we do so.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and to Stephen Carter of Yale University Law School.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Drones are increasingly becoming some of the most valuable weapons in America’s arsenal.

Drone operator speaking on video: This is going to save someone’s life today.

LAWTON: Unmanned aircraft such as the Predator and the Reaper can hover over remote areas and do surveillance for hours, even days. Their operators are often in places as far away as Nevada or Virginia, and the drones can release missiles or bombs with no risk to those operators. Experts say within 20 years the vast majority of America’s fighting aircraft will likely be pilotless. The use of drones may be strategic, but is it moral?

PROFESSOR EDWARD BARRETT (US Naval Academy Center for Ethical Leadership): If you believe that a society has a duty to reduce unnecessary risk to its combatants, then these systems do that, so that would be actually one moral obligation, and then also the state has an obligation to effectively and efficiently defend its citizens, and these systems are effective and efficient.

PROFESSOR MARY ELLEN O’CONNELL (University of Notre Dame Law School): To accept killing far from the situation of battlefields where there is an understanding of necessity is really ethically troubling for many of us.

LAWTON: America’s use of remotely piloted aircraft or drones has increased dramatically since President Obama took office. Both the military and the CIA use them in combat operations and counterterrorism missions. Drones have been engaged in lethal operations in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya. Retired Lieutenant General David Deptula oversaw the US Air Force’s drone program from 2006 until last year. He says remotely piloted aircraft achieve a moral good.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL DAVID DEPTULA: The precision, the persistence, and the accuracy that remotely piloted aircraft bring to the equation actually enhance our ability to accomplish our objectives while minimizing loss of life.

LAWTON: Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter, author of the book “The Violence of Peace,” agrees that minimizing risk to US troops is a worthy goal. But he says it also has moral implications that should not be ignored.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN CARTER (Yale Law School): When America has troops on the ground and people are dying as well as killing, it’s on the news every day. When we’re using standoff bombing, when we’re using missiles that kill but place no risk, it fades from the nation’s consciousness. That means it’s easier to fight, which means it’s more likely that we’ll fight.

LAWTON: Notre Dame Professor of International Law Mary Ellen O’Connell worries that the growing availability of unmanned aerial systems lowers political and psychological barriers to killing.

O’CONNELL: These sleek, attractive, small glider-like planes fly out of their hanger and slip in to a village somewhere and drop a bomb. That seems so easy to do, and on the screen it doesn’t look any different than the video game that the soldier plays later at her home.

DEPTULA: Are these people arguing that, you know, we should only fight if you are exposed to threats and putting your life at risk? That’s silly, and I think it’s ill-founded.

LAWTON: Edward Barrett is director of strategy and research at the US Naval Academy’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. He says, in fact, high-tech sensors on the drones give operators a very detailed picture of what they are doing.

BARRETT: So they’re operating from afar, but their senses are very close to the situation. They see very clearly the battle damage that they are doing, and therefore they know they’re not playing a video game.

LAWTON: He says the distance allows operators to make moral decisions about the use of force.

BARRETT: A soldier in the situation is scared and possible hasty in deciding what to do and acting and possibly even angry, whereas an operator who’s not threatened can use tighter rules of engagement and is not going to be fearful and therefore is going have a much cooler head.

LAWTON: Deptula says much ethical oversight surrounds the US military’s use of drones.

DEPTULA: You have many, many more sets of eyes that are watching what’s going on and many, many more people in the decision loop in terms of employing lethal ordnance if, in fact, that is going to be applied.

LAWTON: O’Connell says she supports the use of drones in combat situations like Afghanistan. But she argues that their use in non-combat settings, such as Pakistan, is morally and legally wrong.

O’CONNELL: International law says that on a battlefield in which armed groups are engaged in organized armed fighting we have a presumption of necessity that persons may be killed without warning in that situation. You can ask any member of the United States armed forces where are we engaged in combat today, and they will all tell you Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They will not tell you Pakistan.

LAWTON: The CIA oversees drone strikes as part of counterterrorism operations, but US officials refuse to discuss the program publicly. According to a tally by the nonpartisan New America Foundation, since 2004 there have been more than 260 US drone strikes in Pakistan, which the foundation estimates killed between 1,600 and 2,500 people. The strikes have generated strong protests from Pakistanis who claim that many civilians as well as militants have been killed. The US takes the position that those strikes are permissible as part of the war against terror.

DEPTULA: Our principal adversary since bin Laden has declared war on the US in the mid-nineties has been al Qaeda. It is fully in cognizance with the laws of international armed conflict to pursue those individuals wherever they reside.

O’CONNELL: They’ve actually been lulled into a sense that killing with drones is not extraordinary, that these are bad people as determined by our CIA, and therefore we can just kill them. This is killing large numbers of persons who we would never allow to be killed if they were in another geographic zone—if they were in the United States, for example.

CARTER: You need really good intelligence on where those missiles are going, because otherwise you’re going to blow up a lot of wedding processions and make a lot of enemies instead of hitting the al-Qaeda leader who you thought was in the car but really wasn’t.

LAWTON: The New America Foundation estimates that while the civilian mortality rate from drone strikes in Pakistan had been about 20 percent, last year it fell to about five percent. As drone technology advances, even more difficult questions may lie ahead.

BARRETT: Perhaps more ethically challenging is the issue of autonomous lethal systems. The idea is that you can use software that recognizes the targets and then makes a decision that’s ethical to destroy targets, with no human intervention.

LAWTON: Wherever the technology goes, ethicists say the moral dimensions must be a significant part of the discussion.

O’CONNELL: We have to be aware of what these technologies are capable of and what they’re doing and demand of our leaders that our ethical, moral, and legal principles that we hold dear, that are the basis of this country, remain uppermost in all of our minds.

LAWTON: Carter believes the principles of the just war doctrine, which have informed military policy for centuries, are still relevant for determining when to use drones.

CARTER: Is there a just cause? Is this the last resort? Can the use of force actually do the thing that we claim we are setting out to do? And is our use of force proportional to the problem we are trying to solve? When we ask questions like that we’re asking moral questions. I think those are the right questions to ask.

LAWTON: The Department of Defense currently has about 8,300 remotely piloted aircraft, not including the CIA’s, and plans to spend about $6 billion in 2012 adding to that inventory.

]]>Armed drones launched the Sept. 30 air strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American radical cleric who tried to recruit Muslims to help al-Qaeda’s terrorist efforts. US officials had considered him one of the most dangerous threats to American security. President Obama said al-Awlaki “repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women, and children to advance a murderous agenda.” The mission, Obama added, showed that Al-Qaeda and its allies will find “no safe haven anywhere in the world.” But some ethicists are raising questions about whether the killing violated international law. University of Notre Dame international law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell released a statement calling the strike an illegal mission. “Derogation from the fundamental right to life is permissible only in battle zones or to save a human life immediately. The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki did not occur in these circumstances,” she said. In an interview with managing editor Kim Lawton earlier this year, O’Connell discussed her ethical concerns about the increased use of drones for targeted killings outside official combat zones. Lawton also talked with retired Lt. General David Deptula, who oversaw the US Air Force’s drone program from 2006 until 2010. He said remotely piloted aircraft allow the US a greater measure of accuracy in the new realities of the war against terror. Watch excerpts from both interviews.

]]>Watch excerpts from a conversation with the director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies on some of the ethical and moral issues at stake in the US raid that ended in the death of Osama bin Laden. Interview by associate news producer Julie Mashack.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Debate continued this week over the likely effects of a controversial bill Congress passed just before it went home. It gives the president power to order trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, not regular courts, and it denies suspects the right to challenge their detention. Is that constitutional? Also, although torture is ruled out by the U.S., the new law does not prohibit sending suspects to other countries where torture has been used. Tim O’Brien reports.

TIM O’BRIEN: Shocking photographs from the prison camp at Abu Ghraib, and a Supreme Court ruling that President Bush must have congressional approval to create military tribunals, combined to produce an agreement on Capitol Hill that will give suspected foreign terrorists many of the same rights given any criminal defendant in the U.S.

Senator BILL FRIST (Senate Republican Leader): They will have the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to military and civilian counsel, the right to exculpatory evidence, the right to exclude evidence obtained through torture and the right to appeal.

O’BRIEN: But those deemed enemy combatants by the president will be denied a basic right accorded most criminal defendants — the right to challenge their detention before or after trial through a procedure known as habeas corpus. That outraged some Democrats.

Senator PATRICK LEAHY (D-VT): It would perpetuate the indefinite detention of hundreds of individuals against whom the government has brought no charges and presents no evidence without any recourse to justice whatsoever. Maybe some of them are guilty. If they are, try them, try them! But you have to understand, there are people in there who have no reason to be there. There’s no charges, no evidence. This is un-American. This is unconstitutional. This is contrary to American interests, and this is not what a great and good and powerful nation should be doing.

O’BRIEN: And some liberal legal scholars, like Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, lamented the law did not do enough to stop torture.

Professor ALAN DERSHOWITZ (Harvard Law School): I think we have the worst possible situation with regard to torture and inhuman treatment. We deny it exists. We claim to comply with all the relevant treaties, and yet we have no real accountability.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.

O’BRIEN: Yet, it has happened. The National Council of Churches is now helping distribute this video at no charge for congregational viewing, purporting to document torture as a tool in the U.S. arsenal against Al Qaeda.

The Reverend Dr. BOB EDGAR (General Secretary, National Council of Churches, introducing “Outlawed” DVD): You’re about to witness two stories of two individuals that our government held in secret and tortured. These stories are hard to watch. Ask yourself what kind of a nation are we. Do we want to lift our nation to higher standards of moral commitment to human rights and civil rights and people’s rights?

O’BRIEN: The video, produced by a coalition of civil rights groups, is indeed hard to watch. One case involves 23-year old Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who claims to have been stopped by U.S. officials as he tried to board a plane in Pakistan on his way home to England. He had used a friend’s passport for identification.

VOICE OF BINYAM MOHAMED’S BROTHER (from “Outlawed” DVD): I refused to talk in Karachi until they gave me a lawyer. I said it was my right to have a lawyer. The FBI said the law has changed, there are no lawyers. You can cooperate with us the easy way or the hard way. On the first day of the interrogation, Chuck said, “If you don’t talk to me, you are going to Jordan. We can’t do what we want here. The Arabs will deal with you.”

O’BRIEN: Mohamed said he was then flown from Pakistan to Morocco in a CIA plane, where his new hosts repeatedly tortured him.

VOICE OF MR. MOHAMED’S BROTHER (from “Outlawed” DVD): One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make a cut. He did it once, and then stood still for maybe a minute, watched my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress my feelings, but I was screaming. There was blood all over.

Pres. BUSH: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture.

Prof. DERSHOWITZ: We’re doing it! We’re denying it, and there’s no accountability, and that leads to Abu Ghraib. When the president, the secretary of defense, the vice president all say, “Torture? Us? No, we’re not doing it.” But then they’re sending subtle messages to the troops on the ground, to the CIA agents: “Do whatever you have to do to protect Americans,” and that message is received as it’s okay to torture, as long as you’re not caught, as long as there are no photographs, as in Abu Ghraib.

Mr. MOHAMED (from “Outlawed” DVD): It never crossed my mind that I would end up being hauled halfway across the world by the Americans to face torture in a place I had never been before — Morocco.

O’BRIEN: Last November, the Bush Administration reluctantly confirmed a WASHINGTON POST report that it had been shipping detainees off to distant prisons in Europe — rendition it is called — but officials insisted torture was never the motive.

Dr. CONDOLEEZZA RICE (Secretary of State): The United States has not transported anyone and will not transport anyone to a country when we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured.

VOICE OF Mr. MOHAMED’S BROTHER (from “Outlawed” DVD): They would say there is this guy who would say you are a big man in Al Qaeda. I would say it is a lie. They would torture me. I would say, “Okay, it is true.” They would say, “Okay, tell us more.” I would say, “I don’t know more.” They would torture me again.

O’BRIEN: Could such abuse have occurred without U.S. consent or even knowledge? Consider that the U.S. does provide Third World allies with arms, modern computer equipment, and much more, all in exchange for information — that according to the chief architect of the CIA’s once clandestine rendition program.

MICHAEL SCHEUER (Former CIA Official): All of those things are important, and they are necessary to forge the relationship. But they’re also elements which make you very cautious about the information you receive from those intelligence services. They’re not going to want to give you, for example, information that might make you think the relationship isn’t worth the money you’re investing in it.

O’BRIEN: Mohamed says U.S. officials knew full well what was going on.

VOICE OF Mr. MOHAMED’S BROTHER (from “Outlawed” DVD): When the Americans told me in Karachi, “Our friends the Arabs know how to deal with you,” I didn’t really know what they were talking about. Now I understand why the Americans called the Moroccans “our Arab friends.”

O’BRIEN: Mohamed is now being held at Guantánamo and faces a trial before a military tribunal on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism. If he were an Al Qaeda operative and had information that could perhaps save thousands of lives from a 9/11 style attack, would that have made a difference?

O’BRIEN: Not to Reverend George Hunsinger, who in person and on his Web site has been mobilizing religious groups to take a stand against torture.

Rev. HUNSINGER: There can be no compromise on torture. Torture is never justified. If torture is not evil, nothing is evil.

O’BRIEN: Alan Dershowitz shares Reverend Hunsinger’s revulsion of torture but, finding it inevitable, has a novel approach on how to deal with it.

Prof. DERSHOWITZ: I personally am completely opposed to torture and the use of degrading methods. But I think it’s going on, and therefore I propose the use of a “torture warrant” which would require the president of the United States to sign on the dotted line and say, “I am responsible. I made a decision to violate the law because 100,000 American lives were at stake.” If we ever had a situation where we had in captivity somebody whose torture could theoretically produce information to save lives, we would do it. The only question is, would we do it with accountability or without accountability? If we’re going to do it, I want us to do it with accountability.

O’BRIEN: The measure Congress approved still permits rendition — the transfer of detainees to prisons in distant countries — but it does not permit torture, which several senators noted violates not only international human rights law but also U.S. criminal law.

Senator LINDSAY GRAHAM (R-SC): Torture has always been a crime, so anyone who comes on this floor and says the United States engages in torture, condones torture, that this agreement somehow legitimizes torture — you don’t know what you’re talking about.

O’BRIEN: For the Guantánamo detainees, the new law sets guidelines for their trials before military commissions. But since there is nothing to prevent rendition, there are no guarantees that what Binyam Mohamed claims happened to him couldn’t happen to them.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Tim O’Brien in Washington.

ABERNETHY: Already prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and this week in Afghanistan have filed suit demanding that they be formally charged and permitted to talk with lawyers or be let go.

After six months of stiff resistance and faced with an overwhelming and embarrassing political defeat, President Bush on December 15 reversed himself and reluctantly agreed not to veto a law banning cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.

The agreement caps a year of legal and policy debates on torture, but a recent stream of new revelations — the abuse (and deaths) of U.S.-held detainees, secret CIA prisons with “unique” interrogation methods, the “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners to other countries that practice torture, and the torture of prisoners at facilities run by the U.S.-backed Iraqi regime — suggests that the issue of torture is neither morally resolved nor politically settled.

The proposed law extends the torture ban to specifically include cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners overseas (such treatment is already banned in the United States) and applies it to all civilian intelligence interrogators, including the CIA, as well as U.S. military personnel. It establishes the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of prisoners.

“We’ve sent a message to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists,” said Senator John McCain, R-AZ, chief sponsor of the provision. “What we are is a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people, no matter how evil or bad they are.”

McCain was voicing one of the key moral principles at stake in any consideration of the ethics of torture. But with the exception of a limited number of examples of religiously and ethically grounded criticism of U.S. policy and practice, most public debate has focused on legal rather than ethical or religious questions, and there has been little thoughtful examination of the historical complexities, nuances, and ambiguities that can be found even within religious traditions when it comes to torture.

Two days before Bush announced his acquiescence to McCain’s torture ban, Pope Benedict XVI issued his first World Day of Peace message and declared that “international humanitarian law ought to be considered as one of the finest and most effective expressions of the intrinsic demands of the truth of peace. Precisely for this reason, respect for that law must be considered binding on all people.” At a news conference releasing Benedict’s message, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council on Peace and Justice, said the pope was urging all countries that have signed the Geneva Conventions barring torture to “respect” them. “Torture is a humiliation of the human person, whoever it is,” he said. “The Church does not allow these means to extract the truth.”

In the United States, the National Council of Churches (NCC) and its mainline Protestant and Orthodox denominations sharply denounced the administration in November for its resistance to the McCain measure. An ad hoc coalition from across the religious spectrum, including evangelical Christians, Unitarians, Muslims, Quakers, and lay Catholics, told the president that the nation’s ban on torture, left confused by the administration’s post-9/11 policies, “must be restored in U.S. policy and practice.” After the McCain-Bush agreement was announced, the NCC praised the two leaders. “By taking this principled stand, President Bush reflects the views of the American people that torture can never be morally justified or legally sanctioned by the United States,” said Antonios Kireopoulos, an associate general secretary of the NCC.

Much of the torture debate continues to focus on legal and human rights issues. In part, of course, that is because the ban on torture and on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment is written into law — international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions and U.S. laws that implement the treaties and make them applicable in the United States. Much of the Bush administration’s effort at explanation and justification has been legalistic, as well. As the now infamous “torture memos” from the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel and the Justice Department indicate, the issue never reached a discussion of the morality of torture but dwelled, instead, on how to find a legal rationale for exempting the United States from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution. Thus, suggest Joyce S. Dubensky and Rachel Lavery, staff members at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding and contributors to THE TORTURE DEBATE IN AMERICA, a new book edited by Karen Greenberg, who directs New York University’s Center on Law and Security, and published by Cambridge University Press, it is not surprising that religion has not been more dominant in the torture debate. “Modern concepts of human rights are largely defined in terms of ethics and law,” they point out. “In fact, none of the central international human rights conventions mention God or a spiritual inspiration as a basis for protecting the welfare of all human beings.”

Dubensky and Lavery argue that “shared values in world religion” can aid in finding more universal bases than law or legal principles for supporting human rights and a ban against torture. “While all religions worldwide do not identify the same theological basis for human rights, there are basic values across religious traditions that offer a powerful rationale for a shared condemnation of torture,” they observe.

At the same time, their survey of world religions — principally Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Baha’i — notes how in the past, religious systems have justified torture as “the lesser of two evils.” The Inquisition carried out by the Roman Catholic Church, they note, is a well-known example of “how members of one religious community came to support the use of torture for what it believed were rightful ends. The Inquisition’s tortures were intended as instruments of salvation targeting Muslims and Jews and were used to identify heresy or other permutations of religious guilt, thereby saving the souls of sinners. … Many of the torturers saw themselves as performing acts of Christian charity, rooted in the Golden Rule’s mandate to do good for others.”

In another new book, TORTURE: RELIGIOUS ETHICS AND NATIONAL SECURITY (Orbis Books), Jesuit priest John Perry, who is also an ethicist at the University of Manitoba, notes how the Catholic Church’s position on torture has changed over time but still is not, he insists, as robustly antitorture as it should be. He cites as one positive sign of change the Jubilee Year “Confession for Commission of Sins Committed in the Service of the Church” led by Pope John Paul II at the beginning of Lent on March 12, 2000, when then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was given the task of confessing the sin of “the use of force in the service of truth” during the liturgy.

Dubensky and Lavery also found that torture to obtain information in order to save lives has religious justification. They cite the Talmud’s emphasis on the value of each human being — “One who saves but a single life is as if he has saved the entire world” — and the opinion of Jerusalem-based rabbi Shraga Simmons that “reasonable physical pressure” could be justified to save lives, but only in an extremely rare situation. This defense of torture, widely used by administration officials, is sometimes known as the “ticking bomb scenario.” It implicitly asks whether torture would be morally justified if a suspect in custody possessed information about a hidden nuclear bomb.

That argument has been given wide currency recently by neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who responds bluntly to the “ticking bomb” scenario: “Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty,” he wrote in the December 5 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. For Krauthammer, that establishes the ethical principle that “torture is not always impermissible.” In fact, he argues, not only is it permissible, it should be made legal. Once deemed permissible in extreme cases, it is thus permissible in less extreme cases.

After Congress accepted his proposal, John McCain muddied the waters of the torture debate by suggesting the president could order “harsh” treatment — presumably techniques barred by international and U.S. law — to gain information from a suspect with “ticking bomb” information. “In that million-to-one situation, then the President of the United States would authorize it and take responsibility for it,” McCain said. Left unclear was what he meant by “take responsibility.” Did it mean the president was immune from the constraints of the law or, like Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights campaigners, the president would break the law but be willing to pay the price for the violation?

In a powerful rejoinder to Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at THE NEW REPUBLIC, raises in the December 19 issue of that magazine what he calls the “imperfect analogy” to civil disobedience with regard to Krauthammer’s argument that torture is permissible. “In fact, civil disobedience implies precisely that laws should not be broken, and protesters who engage in it present themselves promptly for imprisonment and legal sanctions on exactly those grounds. … They are not saying that laws don’t matter. They are saying that laws do matter, that they should be enforced, but that their conscience in this instance demands that they disobey them.”

The crux of the issue, in both the overt and the implied religious debate on torture, turns on the question of the humanity of the person to be tortured — a possible terrorist, an enemy combatant, or any of the other thousands detained in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, or the CIA’s “black site” prisons without a label, or with a very inexact one. For Krauthammer, detainees (he assumes them to be terrorists) “are entitled … to nothing. Anyone who blows up a car bomb in a market deserves to spend the rest of his life roasting on a spit over an open fire.” He is outraged that the United States gives Qur’ans to detainees: “That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.” Leaving aside the fact that none of the Guantanamo prisoners has been convicted of killing innocents — and Pentagon reports on the abuse at Abu Ghraib have said that as many as 90 percent of those held were not guilty of anything — Krauthammer raises and rejects the essential humanity of the detainees as a moral dimension to be considered in their treatment.

Krauthammer’s view flies in the face of much religious thought as well as the secular views of classic democratic theorists. For Sullivan, insisting on the humanity of terrorists is “critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.” To reduce them to a subhuman level, he writes, “is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing.” Recalling the use of torture to “save” souls in the religious wars of the 16th century, Sullivan argues that “the very concept of Western liberty sprung in part from an understanding that, if the state has the power to reach that deep into a person’s soul [and destroy their individual autonomy] and can do that much damage to a human being’s person, then the state has extinguished all oxygen necessary for the freedom to survive. … You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value,” he writes.

Similarly, Perry observes that “state-sponsored torture drives a stake into the heart of human community through its violation of the human person.” A torturer “not only defaces another brother or sister, but implicitly attacks the face (image) of God in the other.”

Dubensky and Lavery make the same point in their survey of religious resources for condemning torture. “The three Abrahamic faiths … share a fundamental belief that all humans are created in the image of the one God. The torture of another person, therefore, desecrates a being created in the divine image. And this is prohibited.” They conclude: “Within every religious tradition, there are core values capable of providing the foundation for a shared perspective that all people must be treated with respect — as we would for ourselves.”

It is worth noting that for an administration steeped in the public rhetoric of religiosity and staffed with people of deep religious commitment, White House and department explanations of policy decisions about the use of torture, some still shrouded in secrecy and only partly known, have been curiously devoid of ethical reflection or moral reasoning. For the administration and for many Americans, September 11 represented a turning point in the history of the United States, if not of all humanity. It was as if history began anew. Former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, now the U.S. attorney general, who helped to frame the Bush policies about treatment of prisoners of war, called it “a new paradigm.” Former CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black, testifying on September 26, 2002 about the CIA’s operational flexibility, explained it this way: “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that’s all you need to know: there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off.”

As constitutional law professor Richard H. Weisberg points out in an essay on “why lawyers take the lead on torture” that is included in the book TORTURE: A COLLECTION, edited by Sanford Levinson and published by Oxford University Press, apologists for torture “invoke special emergency conditions (whether spiritual or geopolitical), as though the world had never before seen such conditions. Where the premodern torturer perceived some unique threat to the soul, the modern torturer sees it to the nation-state, and his or her postmodern apologist manages to forget history in an ironic rush to cloak the torturer’s brutality in the language of utilitarianism.”

The debate this year over the McCain law and the strong bipartisan political and public support it enjoyed suggest that there is, indeed, a broad moral consensus against the use of torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of those the United States holds in captivity. But how that consensus is put into law and then parsed into policy, from definitions of torture to techniques for its employment, and whether public deliberation might still be cast in the language of religion and ethics, remains largely unresolved.